2014 has just come to a close. No doubt, your family has had a big year! Why not commemorate the events and milestones of the year with a customized photo montage? Our Scattered Pictures service is a great way to pull together the important moments of your family’s year into a beautiful montage, complete with custom music.

This is a story about how a photo book or photo video montage can help a dementia patient build new memories based on old photographs.

My aunt started looking for her husband about a couple months ago. This is a new twist to her dementia condition. No, this is not a story of a dementia woman looking for her spouse who has been dead for many years already. Her husband is right there in the same room with her. Though she can’t understand why she feels comfortable, a sense of familiarity, with this gentle grey-haired old man, she insists he’s not her husband. Her husband is young, about thirty-ish, and handsome as can be.

If you’ve not had a loved one suffer this condition, it may be very hard for you to understand how frustrated, earnest and insistent the loved one can be about her view of the world. You may succeed in correcting her after you turn blue explaining thirty years have passed. She may reluctantly accept this gentleman as the man she married, then relapse again the next day.

Since it’s so difficult to correct her memories, we helped her build new ones. Her children gathered photographs all the way back from her wedding day, scan the photos to digital images, and b

uilt a video montage that spans 30 years, from her wedding days, to when the kids were young, including vacation trips with her husband when they were in their thirties, forties, fifities, all the way to the present. All in all, we used 156 photos, and created a 14 and a half minutes of music video montage that was beautiful, touching, and memory-building.

Maybe it’s too early to tell, but for the last couple of weeks since she watched the video montage – over and over and over

again – she has accepted this kind, gentle older man who reaches out his hand to hold hers ever so often, as her sweet husband after all.

I am a memory keeper. I’m not a therapist or physician – who knows if this is conventional therapy for dementia patients, but if you have someone in your family suffering from dementia, it may be worth a try to build a memory book or memory video slideshow spanning the decades of years that have blurred in their minds.

When I spend thousands of dollars and weeks of planning on a family vacation, I make sure I have photos to remember these memories. I anticipate many years from now, my grown child may be in a therapist office complaining about a neglected childhood, and I’ll have photos and videos to prove otherwise!

1. Take photos of people, not things. Now that I work in a video transfer store, where I see families’ vacation photos and videos decades after they were shot, it gives me insights into what really are valuable photo and video shots that will be cherished twenty-thirty years later and what is fluff, inconsequential. For example, your first sight of the Eiffel Tower may inspire you to take hundreds of photos of the magnificent landmark from multiple angles. But the Eiffel Tower is not going anywhere, is unlikely to look different years from now. So only take a photo of the Tower if you or your kids are in the photo as well.

Gayle, a customer who had boxes of carousel of slides to transfer to digital images told us how she hired a neighborhood kid to go through the slides to put aside all the ones without any faces. She would invest money digitizing the ones with faces, but not the ones without. Most of us take digital photos now so there’s a low cost to snapping away freely. Still, when it comes to preserving memories, think faces, people, over inanimate things.

2. Make something out of the photos – a photobook, a highlight video montage. Many of us have thousands of digital photos filed away in bits and bytes on our computers. The massiveness of them – repeats, poor shots, shots of things that interested us then but not now – keep us from enjoying them. I take the best of the best photos and create a photobook, and also a highlight video montage. It’s so much more enjoyable going through a 3 minute video memories of Paris 2007, then to go through hundreds of photos. Services like ScatteredPictures.com will take your vacation photos and turn them into a professional-looking keepsake video montage.

3. Make it easy. Unless you plan to take one vacation your whole life, make the process of preserving vacation memories easy. If you are doing it yourself, stay with simple software like animoto.com that you don’t need to relearn each time, but can produce a pleasing finished product. If you can afford it, do the hard job of selecting the best photos that capture your vacation experience, then hand them off to a professional to turn into a photo book or a music highlight video montage. You want to end up with a library of photobooks, or video montage DVDs of your vacations, not with a much overdue lists of post-vacation must-dos that give you guilt instead of joy.

One important tip: Make sure to include yourself in your family vacation photos. Many adults, me included, wish they saw more of the parents in the old family photos and videos, and not just of kids. After all, how are you going to prove to your child (and the therapist) that you were there too, and you didn’t just put them on a bus.

“Hi Myrtha, Chingis and Allison,
Your work is truly outstanding! The video’s final outcome is so beyond what I had expected and thus I am so appreciative of everyone’s efforts to compile such an extensive collection of my mother’s ninety years. Without question, the video will be the highlight of her party. I know in advance, everyone will be spellbound when they watch it.
Your creativity, artistic flair and excellent choices of background pictures and techniques produced a video that I will always treasured. Thank You so much for creating a lasting memoir for my whole family. I will be raving about your work for years to come and for certain let others know about your professional high caliber of services. Thank You, ”
Fredda Broverman, Sudbury, MA